Tagged: Malinowski

In view of Professor Barfield’s lecture on 11/29 about Malinowski’s notions of exchange and reciprocity, here is today’s analect: Apart from any consideration as to whether the gifts are necessary or even useful, giving for the sake of giving is one of the most important features of Trobriand sociology, and, from its very general and […]

On Thursday November 29th, Professor Barfield will lecture to the students of CC203 about anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his ideas of exchange and reciprocity. Thinking about Malinowski’s continuing if too-little acknowledge impact on our society, we present this clip from The Young Indiana Jones. In it, our young protagonist is asking the elderly, wise ethnologist for […]

Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic, position, that at the every moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity. – Malinowski, Argonauts of the Pacific, […]

In honor of CC203‘s examination of the seminal ethnography by Bronislaw Malinowski: The time when we could tolerate accounts presenting us the native as a distorted, childish caricature of a human being are gone. This picture is false, and like many other falsehood, it has been killed by Science. – Argonauts of the Western Pacific

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